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Mark Twain on General Baby
In 1879, at a banquet in Chicago, given by the Army of the Tennessee to their commander General Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain rose to propose a toast to a oft-ignored ‘minor’ entity: You soldiers all...
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General Petraeus Goes to CUNY: Nobel Prize Winners, Eat Your Heart Out
The initial reaction to the hiring of General David Petraeus to teach at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College was one of astonishment at the salary–$150k for one semester–offered; this has since devolved...
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56-Up: Checking In With ‘Old Friends’
Roger Ebert once referred to Michael Apted‘s Up series as the ‘noblest project in cinema history.’ In writing his review of 56-Up–the latest installment in the story of the Fab Fourteen–Ebert disowned...
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Redskins and Indians: America Isn’t Done With the Natives Yet
Years ago, on ESPN, I saw a young African-American player on the Washington Redskins‘ roster interviewed about the periodic controversy over his team’s name. The interviewer asked, quite...
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Geronimo and the Cruel, Beautiful, West
Yesterday’s post on the continued presence of derogatory team names and mascots in American professional sports was, in part, prompted by my reading of Geronimo‘s autobiography. It is a short book, an...
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The Genealogy of Moi
In reviewing Francois Weil‘s Family Trees: A History of Geneaology in America (‘In Quest of Blood Lines‘, New York Review of Books, 23 May 2013) Gordon S. Wood, after tracking an older American...
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Of Academic Genealogies
Yesterday, in a post on this blog, I wrote about the most familiar kinds of genealogies, the familial, and the quest to uncover their details. Today, I want to make note of another kind of genealogy...
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An Independence Day of Sorts: Beginning a Migration
15 August 1947 is Independence Day in India. It is also my father-in-law’s birthday, a midnight’s child. And it is the day I left India–in 1987, forty years later–to migrate to the US. My...
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The Revealing Game of Time Machine Travel
For some time now my favorite ‘after-dinner game’ has been to ask my respondents the following questions: If you had a time-machine, where and when in the past would you go? And when you arrived, would...
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Ambition, the ‘Dangerous Vice’ and ‘Compelling Passion’
In reviewing William Casey King‘s Ambition, a History: From Vice to Virtue (‘Wanting More, More, More‘, New York Review of Books, 11 July 2013), David Bromwich writes: Machiavelli thought ambition a...
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(Coded) Messages in Bottles
As part of his continuing series on free speech in Asia, Timothy Garton Ash turns his attention to Burma–the land of military juntas and Aung San Suu Kyi–and points us to some deft work to get around...
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A Norm-Preserving Bombing
War waged to prevent the gratuitous, deliberately caused, cruel, inhuman loss of innocent life; a moral intervention, a just war. War waged to preserve an international norm, a collective sensibility...
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The 9/11 Attacks: A Terrifying Spectacle, Viewed from Afar
On September 11th, 2001, I was in Sydney, Australia, working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales. I spent most of the day in my office, composing a long email to my...
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‘Prohibited’ and ‘Acceptable’ Weapons and Targets in War
In my last two posts on Syria on these pages–here and here–I’ve tried to express my discomfort at the threat made by the US to launch cruise missile strikes in response to the alleged use of chemical...
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The ‘Historic’ Statue Toppling That Wasn’t
In his essay ‘The Toppling: How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war‘ (The New Yorker, January 20, 2011), Peter Maass provides, by way of context and background, a useful deflationary...
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CLR James on the ‘Surprisingly Moderate’ Reprisals of the Haitian Revolution
Here are two very powerful passages from CLR James‘ classic The Black Jacobins: Touissant L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution (Vintage Books, second edition revised, New York, 1962, pp. 88-89):...
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Lech Majewski’s The Mill and The Cross: A Beautiful Moving Tableaux
The Mill and the Cross, Lech Majewski‘s 2011 film, like Pieter Bruegel the Elder‘s The Procession to Calvary, the painting that inspires it, is beautiful to look at. It might be hard to know what to...
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The Burdens of Proofreading and Copy-Editing
There must be some sort of writer’s law out there that captures the sensation I am about to describe: as your book approaches the finish line, and as the final proofreadings, corrections, indexing...
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RIP Norman Geras
Norman Geras, prolific blogger and professor emeritus of politics at the University of Manchester has passed away at the age of 70. He had been suffering from prostate cancer. Norm was best known as a...
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William Dalrymple’s Uneven Vision of Modern India
William Dalrymple is a talented writer who can very often turn out gorgeous descriptions of lands, peoples and the built environment. As might be expected, when I encounter writings about places and...
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